Queering Muslim Masculinities: The Politics of Evoking Desire Through Desi Aesthetics

This major research project highlights the Eurocentric aesthetic present in fashion imagery. This project uses an auto-ethnographical approach with a decolonial framework with POC lens in relation to the gaze. The final project aims to offer an alternate aesthetic vocabulary not rooted in the western tradition of fashion imagery. This MRP is an autoethnographic visual reflection vis-à-vis research creation project through self-portraiture. The theoretical framework is the gaze. The scope of this paper deals with the white queer gaze in problematizing it through a POC gaze. Instagram is used as a tool to journal the subject's identity visually. The intersections of masculinity, fashion and colonization are some of the points of departure for the research - exploring Muslim masculinities through photography that challenge the western gender-binary/masculinity as displayed in western fashion imagery. In the process, the western aesthetic is also questioned and challenged with a homoerotic, queer, POC gaze and queer affect.